The Ultimate Baseball Book

by Daniel Okrent (Editor), Harris Lewine

Updated and expanded for the the new season, this lavishly illustrated history of the game begins with the early leagues in the 1870s and follows the game through good and bad patches with narrative commentary by Red Smith, Wilfrid Sheen, Roy Blount, George Will, and others. Reprint.

Genres: Baseball, Sports, Nonfiction

432 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Daniel Okrent's 40-year career has encompassed nearly every form of mass media. In book publishing, he was an editor at Knopf, Viking, and Harcourt. In magazines, he founded the award-winning New England Monthly and was chief editor of the monthly Life. In newspapers, he was the first public editor of the New York Times. On television, he has appeared as an expert commentator on many network shows, and talked more than any other talking head in Ken Burns's Baseball. In film, he was featured in the documentaries Wordplay and Silly Little Game, appeared in a speaking role in Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown, and had what he calls "a mumbling role" in Lasse Hallstrom's The Hoax. Online, he headed Time Inc.'s internet efforts in the late 1990's, and has recently given in to the dubious charms of Facebook.

But all that, he says, was either preparation for (or distraction from) what he most wanted to do: write books. Beginning with Nine Innings in 1985, and proceeding through the 2010 publication of Last Call, Okrent has been (wrote novelist Kevin Baker in Publishers Weekly) "one of our most interesting and eclectic writers of nonfiction over the past 25 years." In addition to the books featured on this site, he was also co-author with Steve Wulf of Baseball Anecdotes (Oxford University Press, 1987), and author of The Way We Were: New England Then, New England Now (Grove Weidenfeld, 1989), currently out-of-print.

Reviews

[tortoise dreams · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is what I think used to be called a "coffee table book," oversized and full of pictures. My copy is the first edition (though maybe not a "first edition") from 1979. It contains an extensive, informative, and fascinating (to baseball fans) decade-by-decade history of the game as well as nine essays by a some of the OG baseball writers such as Robert Creamer, Wilfrid Sheed, Red Smith, Roy Blount, and Mordecai Richler. The most valuable part of the book is the "more than 800" historical photographs that you'll not find anywhere else. An incredible, rare, and stunning collection, as well as over 200 pictures of baseball memorabilia and ephemera, and a specific 16-page "Portfolio of Baseball Art 1876-1978" in lush, rich color. A magnificent book to be treasured by any baseball fan, with the only drawback being that my copy ends with the 1978 season. I note that additional editions were published in 1991 and 2000, though I can't speak to how well those updates succeeded. This edition contains 352 very large pages.